James Thomas discussed his life without Google - could you do it?

Guhmshoo also recently revealed who he is and why he picked an alias to use when posting his cartoons.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S.!

Since then we’ve seen major public companies post for new employees that have a minimum of 250 followers on Twitter.

But the HUGE news this evening is that Microsoft and Linux have made love on Twitter by exchanging tweets. While there are 10,000 startups that wish they got coverage, instead a twitter message gets mad coverage.

The Microsoft/Linux tweets are nothing compared to our BREAKING NEWS that a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan have exchanged Twitter messages. Typically this is banned - for example, as a Yankee fan, I am banned from the entire state of Massachusetts.

After 100 years of the most heated rivalry in all of sports, there just might be a new day dawning for two of the most storied teams in baseball. Will this conversation continue? Will Yankee fans eat baked beans and will Boston fans finally realize that the Yankees are the better team? I don’t know but I can assure you this…. if it happens on Twitter, we will break it!

TC50 founder Michael Arrington has doubled the amount of advertising. He says whatever DEMO offers, he will double it.

Arrington notes, “Our ads will be on our various TechCrunch networks sites and via our terrific sponsors, who are going to be adding their own inventory as well. We’ll give half to the top two winners, and half to everyone else who launches.”

It seems the silly wars appear to be on yet again this year. 

I think it’s great that both DEMO and Techcrunch50 are offering bigger prizes - anything to help the startups that present past the initial buzz is a good thing. Let’s just hope Jason, Heather, Mike and Matt remember the end goal and don’t get back to last years “TC50: 1 - Demo: 1 - Startup: 0“.

Now it appears DEMO has stepped up the prize pool bigtime by offering two $1 million dollar prizes. The prizes will be awarded to the best enterprise startup and the best consumer startup. The prizes are basically ad buys over the six month period following the conference.

Update 5:30PM: It appears that the total prize is $1 million, not two million as I previously noted. I am not sure if I got it wrong or if they changed it. I thought it read that two winners (one consumer, one enterprise) would each receive $1m.

Conference organizer Matt Marshall notes regarding the prize, “The campaign will include print advertisements, web banner placements, text link promotions, email newsletter promotions, and video ads. The package includes the development of creative content that is to be featured on IDG media properties - another huge value proposition to the winning companies.”

I assume the ads will be priced at the rack rate so the $1m is probably worth less had you bought the ads yourself and negotiated a better rate (probably 30% at best). No matter what, it’s good to see the winners get some publicity past the few posts they will get from the conference buzz.

How many of the companies that presented at either conference last year can you name? Can you name 10 of the 50 that presented at TC50? This huge ad buy should help two companies stay top of mind for at least six months and could give them a lift to build from.

The lessons include:

• Customers don’t tell you what they want
• Remember your company values
• Startups are a fu**ing roller coaster
• Biases are dangerous

It seems nearly every entrepreneur I speak with has one learning in common — that is startups are roller coasters. If you’ve posted your learnings, leave a link in the comments and I will add it to the post.

There are lots of people on Twitter who have also had issues accessing the mail service.

As always, please report in if Yahoo Mail is down for you.

Update: 7:45pm - it appears Yahoo Mail is back to normal.

Featured Jobs:

• Technical Director at Your Majesty
• Project Manager at Modea
• Technical Services Analyst - New York at Google
• Senior Brand Strategist at Red Lever Inc
• Creative Director at ABC News
• Senior Brand Strategist at Red Lever Inc
• Traffic/Production Manager at JWT INSIDE
• Front-end Web Developer at GOOD

Employers - Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs today!

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

You can either upload photos or link out to other photo locations (flickr, photobucket, smugmug, some porn site, etc.). Additionally you may link your photo of your dog willy to his twitter page.

Unfortunately it does not appear that there is any option to embed a photoset outside of the originating Tumblr site. This could be a great way to get Tumblr content further along the Internet highway as long as the photoshow links back to the Tumblr site.

If you are new to Tumblr, check out CEO David Karp explaining how Tumblr works.

Pingdom notes, “Pingdom Free has all the features of our paid account types. The only limitation is that you can only monitor one website or server, but that should be enough for a lot of bloggers and hobbyist webmasters out there.”

I wonder how Pingdom will make sure that webmasters don’t signup for 100 accounts, each monitoring one website. I guess creating all of those accounts would be more of a hassle than just signing up for a paid plan.

The idea is that this new version adds a “social layer” to the more traditional project management tools. Zoho notes on the Projects 2.0 release, “Zoho Projects 2.0 goes beyond the traditional ‘project management’ space and helps people work together to achieve a common goal. It’s not just about tasks, milestones and priorities (but we do that too of course). It’s about how people interact and what they need while working on something - whether it’s a local team or a distributed team, an internal team, or a customer-facing one.”

I love this line, “Many times when we hear ‘Project’ he instantly think of a PMI-certified guy with a huge Gantt chart taped in his office door. But every team is always working in some sort of project, whether that’s formally defined or not. And that is where Zoho Projects helps.” Gosh I miss those corporate America Gantt charts each and every day!

Krishnan Subramanian at Cloudave has a great writeup of the Zoho Projects 2.0 launch. Here’s a short video describing the new product:

Tatango provides a group SMS product - basically the idea is that companies can send out SMS messages to mass groups of people who have requested (opt-in) to be part of the group. You can think of group SMS similar to opt-in email marketing except with much shorter messages that are usually very targeted. Check out our video interview with Tatango CEO Derek Johnson to learn more about the company.

While financial terms were not disclosed, Tatango notes, “Over 5,000 customers have signed up, 13,000 messages have been sent, and most importantly - they have experienced a 9% redemption rate of all messages, as opposed to a 1% rate for direct mail.”

Earlier this year Subway partnered with NY-based GoMobo to allow customers to order food before they arrive to save time.

It’s interesting to see Subway testing a variety of new online options for reaching their customers. I can only imagine that Grimace and the King won’t be too far behind.

Here’s the general overview of the position (click the link to read the full job description):

“The Emerging Media Marketing Manager is the primary lead for the Best Buy’s mobile, social, and video marketing & media efforts to drive in-store and online sales, create sustainable word of mouth evangelists, and brand loyalists. This leader will create both bolt-on social and mobile marketing initiatives and other new initiatives and identify business opportunities that can be solved wholly or in part by applying or developing social technology, digital and software strategies and technologies .”

If you are interested in a position in Minnesota, this is actually a pretty damn hot job. To be honest if this is the kind of position you would consider, but don’t care much for Minnesota, I’d still recommend considering it. Most large companies only have one of these positions and Best Buy appears to be doing some things right when it comes to online marketing.  Best Buy wants a lot of experience which is required for a position of this level.

Here’s where the job goes south for me…it’s in the “preferred qualifications” section which has two bullet points and they are:

Preferred Qualifications:

• Graduate degree
• 250 plus followers on Twitter

I know what you are thinking - Allen must be joking. But sadly I am not. They seem to value education at the same level as a silly metric like number of followers on Twitter. I am sure glad I spent time getting my MBA :)

I wonder what internal employee, agency or analyst told them to add that as a requirement?!? My suggestion is if you plan to apply, beef up your followers before you send in your application. And if you think you fit the bill but have no followers, do a search on “add followers to my twitter account” and you can get 250 followers before you click off of this article.

Twitter followers are the new “hits” as a metric.

An interesting note is that their partnership with LinkedIn will allow local searchers to find connections at the companies they are interested in. This could provide job searchers with a leg up on the competition as the referral will come from an internal source if the internal connection is willing to pimp the applicant.

Also, check out our comparison of job aggregation services Simply Hired, Indeed and Jobster.

It appears the free processing was initially available only to non-profit organizations but is now open to any business.

There are a few restrictions:

• you can only sell up to $2 million - after that you pay fees
• you must have an average order size of more than $5
• the account must be new - created after April 29, 2009

One additional thing to consider if you use the service as a trial for subscriptions (where you charge your customer monthly/yearly/etc.). You will need to stay with Amazon for as long as the customer wants to remain a paying customer or you will need to ask them to move to whatever other service you use. This is something I’ve thought a lot about as I look at billing options for my startup. It might be worth testing Amazon on a one-time billing option only.